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Article

The Influence of Rankings on the Development of Universities

The debatable questions of creating university rankings are considered. University rankings are shown to be at the initial stage of development and are used for advertisement purposes in actual fact. The mechanism for composing rankings of material products is objective itself, but objective criteria can hardly be found for such an ideal object as “the quality” of an education; therefore, university rankings are poor due to the subjectivity and bias of “experts.”

This paper examines the impact of family income on the results of the Unified State Examination (the
USE) and university choice in Russia. We argue that, even under the USE, which was introduced
instead of high school exit exams and university-specific entrance exams, entrants from wealthy
households still have an advantage in terms of access to higher education, since income positively
affects USE scores through the channel of a higher level of investment in pre-entry coaching.
Moreover, richer households make more effective decisions about university. We have found positive
and significant relationships between the level of income and USE results for high school graduates,
with an equal achievement before coaching. We subsequently propose that students from the most
affluent households do invest more in additional types of preparation (pre-entry courses and individual
lessons with tutors), and those extra classes provide a higher return for children from this particular
income group. Finally, we show that holding the result of the USE equal, students with good and fair
marks from wealthy families are admitted to universities with higher average USE score than those
from poorer families. As a result, we can observe that income status is a factor that significantly
influences enrollment to university.

Exposure to prenatal androgens affects both future behavior and life choices. However, there is still relatively limited evidence on its effects on academic performance. Moreover, the predicted effect of exposure to prenatal testosterone (T) - which is inversely correlated with the relative length of the second to fourth finger lengths (2D:4D) - would seem to have ambiguous effects on academic achievement since traits like confidence, aggressiveness, or risk-taking are not uniformly positive for success in school. We provide the first evidence of a non-linear relationship between 2D:4D and academic achievement using samples from Moscow and Manila. We find that there is a quadratic relationship between high T exposure and markers of achievement such as grades or test scores and that the optimum digit ratio for women in our sample is lower (indicating higher prenatal T) than the average. The results for men are generally insignificant for Moscow but significant for Manila showing similar non-linear effects. Our work is thus unusual in that it draws from a large sample of nearly a thousand university students in Moscow and over a hundred from Manila for whom we also have extensive information on high school test scores, family background and other potential correlates of achievement. Our work is also the first to have a large cross country comparison that includes two groups with very different ethnic compositions.

Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.